Right, so Andy Burnham thinks the best thing to do during the air-bombing of Yemen by the Saudis is to send one of the RAF’s flying petrol stations in to refuel the perpetrators of the carnage.
But of course it gets tarted up as anything but doesn’t it? Labour calls it "defensive," because, don’t they always? We’re not involved, honest guv. If you say something often enough eventually it becomes the truth is apparently the thinking. Like claiming you had nothing to do with the bank robbery because you only drove the getaway car.
It was a day when Saudi bombs were falling on Yemen; families were picking through what remained of their homes; and an RAF Voyager was in the air, keeping the Saudi military supplied, like Deliveroo for airstrikes.
Here’s what they had to say about that decision.
“Defensive military support.”
That is the government’s explanation. Three words, apparently meant to turn Britain from the bloke holding the ladder into a passer-by who just happened to be there.
Air-to-air refuelling keeps military aircraft in the air longer, lets them go farther from their base, stay longer in an area, and return less often to the ground. It is intrinsic to any actions the Saudis may choose to be carrying out.
The British tanker does not hand over fuel having been given a solemn assurance that it will be used only for charitable purposes and spontaneous hugs has it?
There’s no special shut-off valve marked “defensive only”; no Labour-approved nozzle, with a rosette on and a Vote Andy sticker, which shuts itself off, in case the aircraft ever gets aimed at Yemen. It is simply fuel supplied to an air force actively engaged in a bombing campaign.
If Burnham’s government has invented a force-field that keeps the planes from bombing Yemen on refuelling, the manual for it must be lying in a drawer in Whitehall.
Saudi Arabia requested British help, as the war it had started had become so serious, they were losing allied territory and the Houthis were handing them their arses. Scenes playing out something like this.
The King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, which was the target of a rocket attack. This was supposedly seen off, but the fire would appear to be incontestable; the great pillar of black smoke rising near the scene.
A statement from the Yemeni military asserts that they have used several drones and missiles to strike sensitive targets in Riyadh and at the Saudi Aramco building in Yanbu, the port at the Red Sea end of the Saudi East-West Pipeline, the backdoor for oil transport the Saudis were using after Trump drove Iran to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile the Saudi government claims to have intercepted threats aimed at the capital and other cities.
Later analysis of satellite images, circulated by several outlets, appeared to show seven destroyed fuel tanks near Riyadh airport.
A Saudi fuel facility was very much on fire next to the airport as well, so the pressure the Saudis are facing with regards to energy storage as well as oil delivery is only increasing, the Houthis know exactly where to hit to make it hurt. Add in the East West pipeline attacks too, and the pattern isn’t a tough one to spot.
Fighting around Mokha and the Bab al-Mandab Strait has been further squeezing Saudi access to the Red Sea even after Saudi-backed forces lost Mokha after another major Houthi offensive, and handing the Houthis a major platform right on that Strait to further stymie oil passage.
Saudi Arabia built backup after backup, because even they know that putting all your eggs in one basket around here is the kind of thing that lands you on the evening news with massive fireballs in the background.
The problem is that several parts of the backup plan are now under pressure at once.
Saudi Arabia's response has been to intensify the air campaign in Yemen, the very thing that has led to their own losses, with nothing else to show for it. There’s a reason the Saudis have left so much of their defences to someone else, namely the US, and its because they aren’t much good at taking care of themselves.
And whenever governments start talking about military operations using words like shipping lanes, stability, and national interest, it's a good time to check who's been quietly left out of the story.
That is the human picture concealed behind Burnham's phrase "defensive support".
People who have already lived through years of war are being pushed from their communities again. Families are moving with whatever they can carry while access roads are disrupted and humanitarian organisations struggle to reach them.
I'm not going to repeat that man's experience back to you as though it needs translating into Westminster English. You heard him.
What needs airing more is the chasm between his reality and the antiseptic nonsense Britain keeps using to scrub our fingerprints off the mess.
Regional and Yemeni reporting says Saudi strikes killed civilians around Mokha, including women and children. Separate strikes in al-Jawf reportedly killed communications workers.
Fighting intensified across Yemen's western coast. Mokha changed hands. The port was damaged. Tens of thousands of people were displaced.
Then Burnham agreed to keep Saudi aircraft fuelled.
No food convoys you’ll note. No medical flights. No mercy dash to save lives. No humanitarianism.
Just keeping Saudi military aircraft flying.
Britain will apparently deploy this single RAF Voyager for an initial period of several weeks.
But there is no fixed withdrawal date, no scheduled review point and no published test for extending or ending the mission, or even for initiating it for that matter. The government has merely said the arrangement will be "kept under review". Yeah, there’s a few arms export licences that are still like that too.
So it is temporary, unless they decide otherwise isn’t it?
It's a free trial of military involvement, except the auto-renew box is already ticked and you'll never find the cancel button.
The Voyager gives Saudi aircraft endurance. It reduces their dependence on returning to Saudi bases. It gives military planners more flexibility at exactly the moment Saudi infrastructure is being threatened.
That is why the distinction between assisting an air force and participating in a particular attack matters here.
As much as we can’t claim more than the evidence shows, Burnham also can’t be allowed to claim less than his decision means either.
Britain is supplying an operational capability to the Saudi air force during a Saudi air campaign on a state it started a war with, that is still dealing with the ramifications of years of that and that they are finding tough going because resistance is present.
We’re being made complicit yet again aren’t we?
Look at what the aircraft is doing.
Fuel moves from one military platform into another. It extends what the receiving aircraft can do.
The fuel has no politics. The decision to supply it does.
Burnham's government owns that decision, notably in a climate when fuel prices are rising catastrophically back at home. You might argue he’s doing what needs doing to get the fuel moving, but remind me when the last time somebody managed to militarily get a win over the Houthis to get things running?
The excuse is that Saudi Arabia needs help defending itself from Yemeni attacks, protecting energy infrastructure and keeping vital oil pathways open.
But that's just three wildly different things being chucked into a blender, and hoping it doesn’t come out lumpy.
Saudi territory has been attacked. That is one fact.
Saudi Arabia is also bombing Yemen. That is another.
Britain is supplying the Saudi air force with refuelling support. That is a decision Burnham has made.
Calling that third fact "defensive" though, doesn’t erase the second.
Nor does it answer a very basic question here.
What prevents British refuelling capacity from sustaining Saudi aircraft that are part of the wider Yemen campaign?
Britain will deploy an RAF Voyager for an initial period of several weeks. Fine. Put that in writing, then.
Give us a fixed end date. Publish the conditions under which it can be extended. Rule out its use for Saudi offensive operations in Yemen. Commit to a parliamentary statement before any renewal, with the legal basis, the flights undertaken and exactly who Britain has enabled.
Because "kept under review" is not a safeguard. It is Whitehall shorthand for: trust us, we'll sort all that out later. Meanwhile we remain complicit.
If this really is a limited defensive arrangement, ministers should have no difficulty defining its limits. If they won't, then "limited" is simply a little cardboard sign they hang over an open-ended military commitment.
Publish the safeguards, because 'trust us, it's defensive' is not a safeguard. It's what governments say when what you are doing is blatantly obvious, and the excuses are being made up on the spot.
Saudi Arabia has been bombing Yemen, on and off, since 2015. Britain has spent much of that period selling Riyadh weapons, providing training and insisting that its influence somehow makes everything more responsible.
Saudi Arabia has now returned to bombing Yemen and has now asked us to help keep its aircraft airborne and we’ve said yes.
Baraa Shiban is a Yemeni analyst with the Royal United Services Institute. This is his assessment of the escalation surrounding the Riyadh attack.
Saudi Arabia is not requesting help from a position of confidence.
Its allied forces have lost important ground. Mokha lies roughly 75 kilometres from the Bab al-Mandab Strait, connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden.
That gives all of the fighting consequences far beyond just Yemen.
It affects shipping, Saudi access to the Red Sea, and the oil infrastructure Riyadh depends on when other export channels are threatened.
Saudi Arabia returned to this war intending to reassert power. Instead, it has watched its position on Yemen's west coast deteriorate while attacks have reached deeper into Saudi territory.
And then it called Britain.
Burnham has presented his answer as a contribution to stability, but stability for whom?
Not for the Yemeni families having to move away from Saudi strikes.
Not for communities around Mokha facing another round of fighting.
Not for aid organisations trying to reach people through damaged ports and disrupted roads.
The stability being discussed is the stability of Saudi energy exports, oil prices and the wider economic system built around them and as much as petrol prices and diesel prices rising is not fun, it shouldn’t be costing lives to put it right either should it? I certainly can’t support that.
It makes the Saudi oil disruption that hey have brought upon themselves somebody else's problem. Saudi Arabia remains a major oil producer, and damage to its fuel infrastructure can push up global oil, petrol and transport costs.
So if this escalation tightens supply, Britain feels it at the pump, in food prices, in heating bills and in every delivery that suddenly costs more. The people making the decisions will still be chauffeured to meetings and catered for afterwards. Everyone else gets another price rise and a lecture about "global volatility".
But we should be honest about what Burnham is prioritising too.
Britain has volunteered military assistance to Saudi Arabia on the official basis that it is helping defend Saudi territory and protect wider regional stability. The real-world economic case is obvious too: Saudi vulnerability threatens oil supply, shipping and the prices ordinary households end up paying.
That is precisely why the safeguards matter. Ministers are not offering a symbolic favour to Riyadh. They are inserting Britain into a conflict whose economic fallout can come straight back through our petrol pumps, supermarket bills and energy costs.
The problem is in that picture, Yemen's civilians appear in the explanation merely as background suffering. Saudi infrastructure comes across as the emergency. It’s completely immoral on that basis alone therefore.
That is how another step into another war gets dressed up as competence and leadership though isn’t it?
First, remove the bombing campaign from the centre of the story, because that’s awkward, that’s a toughie to spin.
Replace it with "regional instability" instead.
Replace Saudi Arabia's military setbacks with "threats to energy security".
Replace British assistance to a belligerent air force with a narrative that makes it sound like a benign intervention.
By the time the press office is finished, the RAF Voyager sounds less like a cog in a bombing campaign and more like the AA showing up to jump-start a stranded pensioner.
There is also the small matter of Donald Trump reportedly refusing to give Saudi Arabia the direct American intervention it wanted. So does that mean Trump actually made a smarter choice than Burnham has?
Even Trump, whose Middle East strategy usually involves pouring petrol on everything and then demanding a Nobel Prize for lighting the match at the end, apparently decided to sit this one out.
Burnham decided to put British military capability into the picture and not through a Commons vote.
Not after setting out public safeguards.
Not after explaining where Saudi defence ends and Saudi operations over Yemen begin.
He agreed after receiving advice from his defence and foreign secretaries, so that’s Wes Streeting and Ed Miliband, and announced the decision while travelling to New York, called it time-limited and left the extension mechanism sitting there in the phrase "under review" for whatever the hell that ever even means. It’s such a nonsense, throwaway phrase that tells us sweet FA.
But that’s mission creep for you, if you’ve heard the phrase before. It doesn’t come announced with a brass band, but with a narrow measure, an urgent request and an assurance that everything will be reconsidered at some indeterminate later date.
Then the situation worsens. Another facility is hit. Another Saudi request lands. The tanker stays a bit longer. More 'protection' is needed. British involvement snowballs, because pulling out would apparently cause the sky to fall. Give it a few weeks and this 'temporary measure' will have its own HR department and a new government acronym nobody can pronounce.
And what happens if Saudi strikes kill more civilians while RAF assistance continues then?
Who decides whether British support helped make those strikes possible? Will ministers publish the flight logs, the missions refuelled, the legal advice and the safeguards supposedly separating "defence" from Saudi bombing runs in Yemen? Will Parliament get a vote before this arrangement is extended? Going by how well such attempts have gone regarding surveillance flights over Gaza and the like under Starmer’s tenure I think we can hazard an educated guess.
Ministers saying they will keep it 'under review', is not accountability. It's the same people who signed Britain up for marking their own homework, then quietly deciding whether to give themselves a gold star.
The government will say there is no evidence that a British tanker supported that specific mission.
That may be true.
But it will not answer why Britain chose to strengthen the operational capacity of the air force conducting the campaign.
Burnham cannot demand credit for supporting Saudi defence while disclaiming every foreseeable consequence of supporting the Saudi air force that may come off the back of it, especially given what has already happened in Yemen at Saudi hands on and off since 2015.
A Saudi fuel facility burned beside Riyadh airport.
Saudi aircraft are striking Yemen.
Yemeni families are being displaced again.
Saudi Arabia asked Britain for military assistance, and Andy Burnham agreed to provide the RAF capability that keeps military aircraft airborne. Burnham has taken a Saudi war that was already stuck in the mud, strapped British hardware onto the bombers, and slapped a 'defensive' sticker on the whole shebang. Labour can try to bury it under buzzwords like stability and sell it to we the British public as energy security, but an RAF tanker is still keeping Saudi jets in the sky. At the same time, Yemen burning is not some distant technicality. It's direct involvement, and every new Saudi strike, every family forced out, every extension of this 'temporary' farce will drag Britain deeper into a disaster Burnham signed up for. It really is like Keir Starmer never left so far isn’t it?
For more Burnham balls ups, because he’s running before he can walk here right now, do stick with the channel for more, such as this story right here for your recommended next watch.
Please do also hit like, share and subscribe if you haven’t done so already so as to ensure you don’t miss out on all new daily content, as well as spreading the word and helping to support the channel at the same time, which is very much appreciated, holding power to account for ordinary working-class people, and I will hopefully catch you on the next one. Cheers folks.